[K12OSN] TeacherTool

[Les Mikesell]

On Thu, 2004-09-30 at 07:54, Liam Marshall wrote:

> I would love it if someone could modify it for me, if possible.  the
> idea of using student numbers for their usernames is just too tempting
> to pass up.  I would dearly love for TeacherTool to troll for usernames
> beginning with numbers as well as letters

This can probably be done as a quick-fix to this application, but
you'll keep hitting the same problem again as you use other
programs.   Unix always maps login names and groups to its
own number concept (uid,gid) and there are always going to
be programs that try to be helpful and accept either the
number or name but will be confused if a name is numeric
but not the ascii representation of the underlying internal
number.

It might be interesting to force the uid's to match the
numeric names as you add users but you'd be better off in
the long run to add an alpha prefix to distinguish the
two forms.  That only requires a tiny amount of extra
work in scripted management and removes any conceptual
confusion.

---
  Les Mikesell
    les at futuresource.com